Salt, it’s what’s for dinner

This just makes me laugh. Is salt good? bad? The answer is that nobody knows and that it depends and that humans are complicated systems.

A key paragraph:

“In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.”

Note the correlation-causation mistake. Also note the last sentence – 60x higher in rats than in what humans consume. Many a conclusion about what is good or bad for humans has been drawn from what is good or bad for animals in extremely unrealistic doses.

It’s stuff like this that reassures me that doubting the “experts” is always a good policy, especially when those experts have nothing to lose if they’re wrong (as is always the case when the experts make recommendations on behalf of the government to the governed). It’s stuff like this that makes me certain that the precautionary principle is completely epistemologically bankrupt and a grand fraud perpetuated against humanity.